


Companion

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sidonie's used to being watched.  But it's different when Imriel's the one doing the watching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Companion

**Author's Note:**

> Written for amchara

 

 

Sidonie has always known Imriel. No matter how far back she casts her memory, there has never been a time without him stalking around the edge of her awareness. More like a creature of legend than a person, really. The Lost Child. The Pureblood Prince.

The threat.

Not that anyone calls him that, not when they think she's listening. Even her great-uncle L'Envers is careful not to offend her delicate ears, though he still manages to make his opinion perfectly clear. Imriel is the dagger poised at her throat, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Everyone knows it. But as long as her mother says otherwise, no one can admit the truth, not out loud. Not to Sidonie. After all, she is above all else her mother's daughter.

Just like him.

The whispers don't go away when the legend finally appears in the flesh, seemingly harmless. They just get louder. Every appearance he makes is a plot in the making. Every absence is conspicuous. Every step he takes is judged and measured, and compared to her.

Sidonie has never had a more constant companion.

*

She's used to being watched. She doesn't have to guess what they see in her anymore; it's understood.

She is the throne.

She is her mother, the same features in miniature, and when the people look at her they see a queen who rode through an army with head held high. They see, and they remember, and they require her to be no less. She's softness and steel at once, or she's a failure.

She is alien. Her father's dark eyes set her apart, so strange in a D'Angeline face. When the people look at her they see a symbol, the proof of her parents' alliance. In their eyes she's something new, a change for the better, their hope for the future, a sign of goodwill.

She is corruption. The perversion of once-holy blood. She's so very, very dangerous.

And so very, very fragile.

A queen, a pawn, as cold and as brittle as glass.

None of it bothers her, neither the hopes they pin on her nor the fears. It comes with the bloodline after all, and she's looking right back at each and every one of them, measuring, judging, trying to discover who she can use to her advantage. All part of the game, the all-important game.

This is different.

She feels Imriel's eyes on her from across the dance floor even as she turns her back on him, and it should make her hold her head that much higher, bearing up under the weight of his expectations or in defiance of them. _Cross me at your peril_ , her body language should be screaming across the room, but those ingrained reactions don't come as easily as they should with him.

He doesn't seem to realize that he's always been the monster under her bed.

His gaze is all wrong. It's in the tension between her shoulder blades, the heat spreading lower, deeper. Muscles clench. Breath quickens.

This is a challenge between them all right, but not the one she was expecting.

When he looks at her, she can't tell what he's seeing.

She doesn't return the favor; her gaze on him is perfectly clear, or so she imagines. Oath or no oath, she knows him first, foremost, and always as the son of Melisande, blood of angels and traitors. The marks of that blood are in his eyes: a dark, roiling anger, a tension pulling him into knots, a pulse of electricity buried just below the surface. He's still a monster. He's just a monster who's handed her his leash.

Her heart beats that much faster at the thought.

*

He's gone for half a year, but that shouldn't change anything. He's always spent more time away from the city than not.

This time, she dreams of him.

She's not Alais, to dream truth; she knows not to take it as anything more than her own imaginings. Even so, the images stay with her throughout the day.

Imriel lying asleep in a foreign city, a trace of tension in his face even in sleep. He smiles a little when she brushes a lock of hair out of his face, takes her wrist and holds her there before he opens his eyes.

Or he's up and away the moment she touches him, daggers sketching an arc in the moonlight before he recognizes her.

Against the wall, and Imriel's bracing her, surrounding her. Too dark for sight. The world narrows to the space between his hands against the wall, his breath against her skin.

Or they're both holding their breath. He stands among an army of the dead, and she stands beside him, her hair pulled back beneath a helmet that doesn't quite fit.

His hair brushes against her thighs.

When she returns to her rooms one night, Maslin is waiting for her. He's had his hair put into braids in the style of the Shahrizai, and the look in his eyes is equal parts loathing and lust. She's not sure how much of either is directed at her, but that doesn't matter. It's a challenge.

It's a game.

She knows how handle both.

What she doesn't know how to handle is the news out of Tiberium. Engagements, alliances; these are understood. Uprising, imprisonments, ransoms refused; these too, in theory.

The letters measure the distance between theory and reality.

Maslin's hands on her shoulders as she reads, a murmur against her cheek. He's a comfort, certainly. But she asks him to leave her nonetheless.

"You shouldn't be alone," he tells her even as he obeys.

"I'm used to it."

"But that's the problem. You're too good at it."

*

Love stories in a Mendacant's tales start with Once Upon a Time and end in Happily Ever After. In life, there's neither. She thinks perhaps the stories have been all used up by their forefathers, and the reality left for her is simpler, and so much more complicated. She's not even sure that she'd call this a love story, this gravity between them. But he comes home. That, for a while, is happiness enough.

She congratulates him on his engagement. It's light and casual, and there's no lie in it. Imriel's engagement will be to her benefit, and after all, they are D'Angeline. But he asks her, when they are alone or nearly so, in a voice that reaches only to her ears, whether it was as the princess or as Sidonie that she congratulated him. She wonders just what he thinks the difference is.

"As a friend, then," she offers. "We are friends, aren't we?"

He doesn't hesitate. "No."

She knows he feels her pulse jump under his thumb, his hand tight on her wrist. That, and a slow smile, is the only answer he gets. The only answer he needs, she knows, as the look on his face mirrors her own, soft and hard at once.

No, not friends. Never that.

 


End file.
